I dont think it really saves you money plus add in the time involved to build and for a basic system for graphics and internet...often times not worth the trouble.
Picking a new PC; advice?
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I dont think it really saves you money plus add in the time involved to build and for a basic system for graphics and internet...often times not worth the trouble.
Okay, as I'm searching and researching before getting Win XP x64, I notice a few things.... 1, this thing is hard to find. 2, there are very annoying compatibility issues. The Adobe software, it turns out, is certified for only 32-bit Windows editions; does this mean that these new resource hogs are meant to run smoothly on a machine with only 4 gb of RAM in total? Then, Wikipedia says Win XP x64 has no native support for Type 1 fonts; how much of a problem is this and does this mean that PostScript fonts can't be used with other 64-bit editions?
there are issues... postscript type 1 fonts are being phased out anyway, like MM fonts before them... microsoft had some patches to resolve printing type 1 and stuff... also MM even they are no longer supported...
the issues on Vista FAR outweigh the issues you will have on XP 64... is the short answer...
there will be a learning curve there... no doubt... but i would go XP-64 over any version of Vista... there is a lot of info out there on the XP 64 OS... specific issues addressed and whatnot...
From Slashdot:
Agreed, but as someone who has just painstakingly managed to install Windows XP on a Dell XPS 1530 (which is officially Vista-only) I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
For the uninitiated, supercache watches everything you do and records a log of what you cause to be loaded into memory and at what time/date it happens (this automatically introduces an overhead into every single memory related operation because Vista has to spend some resources on surveilling you). It then attempts to predict what you are going to use at a given point in time, and pre-caches as much of it as it considers to be reasonable. So for example, if I played Quake III every Wednesday night between 7-8pm, Vista would start grinding away at about 7pm on Wednesdays loading the texture files into RAM. Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
The net effect of all of the above is that Vista spends a hell of a lot of time sitting there churning away using your disks and RAM to load "stuff" into memory that you "might" need. All of this for the 1-2 seconds you are likely saving by not having to load Word or Quake III or whatever from disk should you happen to want to use it.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Which returns me to the original point - XP is already a challenge to get running with some newer hardware. But if hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of their hardware drivers (which should be trivial if they are doing 32 bit Vista drivers) then there's really very little we need from Microsoft.* XP is a stable, solid, mature OS which does what it does pretty well. I for one intend to keep using it into the foreseeable future.
* This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/25/0013235.shtml
Agreed, but as someone who has just painstakingly managed to install Windows XP on a Dell XPS 1530 (which is officially Vista-only) I can attest to the fact that it's not "a bit of slowdown" - it's an imprecise measure but I'd say my laptop now "feels" at least two times faster/more responsive. We are talking about a pretty zippy dual core machine with 3 gigs of RAM and a powerful video card, too (256MB DDR3 nvidia 8600gt), which ran like treacle with Vista on it.
I have since played with another, similar Vista laptop trying to figure out what is doing all the damage. The worst individual offenders seem to be the (well documented) user account control bullshit which interferes with every aspect of the operation of the computer, and "supercache", which would have to be in the top 5 worst Microsoft innovations of all time.
For the uninitiated, supercache watches everything you do and records a log of what you cause to be loaded into memory and at what time/date it happens (this automatically introduces an overhead into every single memory related operation because Vista has to spend some resources on surveilling you). It then attempts to predict what you are going to use at a given point in time, and pre-caches as much of it as it considers to be reasonable. So for example, if I played Quake III every Wednesday night between 7-8pm, Vista would start grinding away at about 7pm on Wednesdays loading the texture files into RAM. Supercache apparently considers about 1.5 gigabytes on a system with 3 gigabytes of RAM to be a reasonable amount of physical memory to use for this process.
The net effect of all of the above is that Vista spends a hell of a lot of time sitting there churning away using your disks and RAM to load "stuff" into memory that you "might" need. All of this for the 1-2 seconds you are likely saving by not having to load Word or Quake III or whatever from disk should you happen to want to use it.
Turning UAC and Supercache off (both pretty straightforward once you know where to look) improves performance a lot - but not enough. Vista still has an offensively huge footprint and runs like a dog compared to XP.
Which returns me to the original point - XP is already a challenge to get running with some newer hardware. But if hardware manufacturers have the guts to stand up to Microsoft and keep producing XP versions of their hardware drivers (which should be trivial if they are doing 32 bit Vista drivers) then there's really very little we need from Microsoft.* XP is a stable, solid, mature OS which does what it does pretty well. I for one intend to keep using it into the foreseeable future.
* This is the main issue at the moment - most laptop manufacturers in particular have abandoned XP support on newer machines.
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/25/0013235.shtml
Don't.
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Well I disagree with you on that point. I've built my own PC and if I were to have bought the same components from say Alienware it would have at least doubled my expenses!!
So my advice is build it yourself and save tons of money and you'll be getting bettter equipment as you learn more about the components that your going to use. It isn't that hard to do, trust me on that.
To be fair, I recall that when Win XP came out the same things were said about it.
Win Vista Service Pack 1 came out and it supposedly fixes some of the problems with speed.
Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is going to be to find drivers for every bit of hardware I'm getting, for three cameras and an mp3 player, and still worry about critically important applications working smoothly? That, and some people say that finding drivers still doesn't solve problems -- their hardware is not recognised; it's rare, but a possibility.
My plan so far is to get Vista 64 bit since I have to order an OS anyway, and experiment with XP x64 later.
Well I disagree with you on that point. I've built my own PC and if I were to have bought the same components from say Alienware it would have at least doubled my expenses!!
So my advice is build it yourself and save tons of money and you'll be getting bettter equipment as you learn more about the components that your going to use. It isn't that hard to do, trust me on that.
Alienware is not a good example, they are overpriced because of brand.
By not building herself she saves a lot of time and trouble.
Yeah, but you could disable the things he's talking about and thus use your RAM and CPU more efficiently.
Yea, a lot of time and trouble that could be some guy's trouble, probably Avatar's, because he's the one who usually helps me with my computer.
www.cyberpowerpc.com
bought my gaming desktop and laptop from them and am satisfied with both. Cheeper than brand names because they cut the "brand name" lol
bought my gaming desktop and laptop from them and am satisfied with both. Cheeper than brand names because they cut the "brand name" lol
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'top of the line' is a nice place to be yes?...
I'm assuming you use Falcon at home, so you can answer this question. I don't have sound. I don't have speakers yet, but I do have headphones, and I'm at a loss of where to plug them in. There's no hole for them in the back, and there's one big hole marked for headphones in the front; but the hole in the front is wayyyy big. I found what looks like an adapter to it, but when I connect my headphones through that I still get no sound. Sound is turned on though, and playing at full volume. There is an SPDIF output (what is that anyway?) thing in the back, but it's optical.
I've had this problem with speakers before when I got a Dell, and something tells me it's a compatibility issue. But that can't be the problem now, it's plain headphones....
That time has come. How do I do what he advises to do?
ok first thing is the obvious... check your volume options and make sure everything has the volume up and is not muted... sometimes the front and rear outputs are muted by default...
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